Buying a home can weigh you down

Commiting to paying off a large home loan can prevent you from achieving your other goals.

Someone once asked me, “What is the biggest hindrance to entrepreneurship?” I replied that there are many, but the key reason is a home loan. He was surprised. I’m sure you are too, but let me explain the correlation.

As a child, from the time we start school, we are told to score well in exams so that we can get admission in a good college. Once we enter college, we are told to work towards getting a good campus placement. Once we land a good job, it’s all about how much we earn versus what our peer group is earning. By the time you are around 25 years old, your parents start badgering you to get married. Once you get married, they want you to have a child. Once you have a child, they say, “One is not enough! Have a second one.”

Between the push to take up a job, get married and have children, people also ask you, “Do you have your own apartment?” Saying that you don’t is not an acceptable answer. They make you feel that if you don’t have a house of your own, you are worthless. Such is the pressure from parents, relatives and acquaintances that you eventually succumb to the constant nagging and buy yourself an apartment.

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To buy this house, you take a loan and commit yourself to paying a large amount as EMI for the next 20-25 years. Here is where your ability to take risks goes for a toss.

It’s not easy to quit a job and launch your own venture when you are servicing a home loan EMI. You need a fixed inflow of money every month to ensure that the EMI cheque does not bounce. Your dreams go out of the window.

Now, do you get the correlation between home loans and entrepreneurship?

When someone asks me, “What does it take to become an entrepreneur?” I just tell them one thing: It requires a lot of courage and the ability to face failures and bounce back.

There is nothing wrong with buying your own house, but don’t do it just because society expects you to. Remember, if you take a home loan early in your career, you would find it extremely difficult to take risks. But if you take risks early in your career and become an entrepreneur, you may never need a loan to buy your dream house.

Society has created a system to produce people who blindly follow the tide. It’s time to break away from dogma and do what you love. Have the courage to find your passion and follow it. Don’t waste your time on thinking about what “those four people” will say about you. You have one life, make it worth it.